Inside the brave new world of novel proteins

Source: The post is based on the article “Inside the brave new world of novel proteins” published in Livemint on 21st June 2023

What is the News?

Precision fermentation can be a safeguard against climate emergencies, besides cutting down future pandemic risks. 

What is Precision Fermentation?

Precision fermentation uses microbial hosts as “cell factories” for producing specific functional ingredients.

How does Precision Fermentation work?

In the precision fermentation process, single-cell organisms—bacteria, microalgae or fungi—are made to produce a protein by giving it coded instructions. 

A microbe, say a yeast, is engineered by inserting the genetic code of a milk protein, one that can be used to make an ice-cream. 

To produce more and more of this desired protein, the microbe is used in a nutrient-rich broth where it happily does what it is told.

After the microbes make enough quantities of proteins in fermentation tanks, the two are separated. The final product is AOF milk or egg-white protein powder, free of any genetically modified organisms(GMO).

Note: Traditional fermentation methods use live bacterial culture to make curd from milk. But precision fermentation teaches a microbe how to make a protein by using a genetic code—also known as the recombinant DNA technology. 

Where is Precision Fermentation currently used?

Precision fermentation is now widely used to produce insulin, a life-saving drug for diabetics, in a lab and not from a pig’s pancreas. 

Likewise, rennet, an enzyme required to make hard cheese, is now manufactured using fermentation and not from the stomach linings of young nursing calves, which were once butchered in large numbers.

What are the challenges in the precision fermentation process?

Currently, food ingredients made using precision fermentation are expensive. For instance, it costs about 20 to 30 times more to make an egg-white protein via fermentation, compared to eggs sourced from a poultry farm. 

The industry is hoping to reach price parity with farm-produced ingredients in the not-so-distant future, as the technology is fine-tuned and breakthrough innovations lower production costs.